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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent...

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Independence Day warning about “dimaagi Naxals” should therefore not be dismissed as another political label. His larger point was that an insurgency does not survive on ammunition alone. It survives on ideas and people willing to make violence appear morally fashionable. The most revealing feature of India’s Maoist movement was never simply its brutality. It was the strange attraction it exercised over sections of the metropolitan Left elite. The Naxalite with an AK-47 could be transformed into a romantic revolutionary while the policeman he killed became an instrument of an oppressive state. This was not merely naïveté. At its ugliest, it was the intellectual laundering of political violence. The fantasy of the romantic revolutionary has always been seductive. In this narrative, amplified through sympathetic media priding itself on telling ‘truth to power,’ India was not a constitutional democracy struggling with inequality and corruption but an inherently illegitimate state waiting to be overthrown. In the minds of this elite Left, Maoist violence has often been recast as resistance while attacks on infrastructure as blows against capitalism. The armed overthrow of the Indian republic was the liberation they craved for. Some of India’s most celebrated intellectuals have flirted dangerously close to that moral inversion. The issue here is whether intellectual prestige can be used to sanitise an ideology whose practitioners have murdered civilians, policemen and public servants and terrorised some of India’s poorest districts. A university cannot be the place where Maoist romanticism acquires the legitimacy of a fashionable campus cause. Professors who turn armed insurgents into heroic revolutionaries are not merely exercising academic freedom. If they knowingly excuse violence, they are helping to construct the moral vocabulary that makes violence possible. Let’s be clear here. A professor who criticises the Indian state is not a Naxal while a journalist who exposes state excesses is not an enemy of India. But an intellectual who repeatedly excuses, glorifies or rationalises political violence cannot hide behind the word ‘dissent.’ India has paid an enormous price for the Maoist fantasy. Thousands have died. Entire regions were held back by fear while development was obstructed. The people supposedly being liberated were often the first to suffer. The armed Naxal is now being pushed towards extinction. But the Indian republic cannot afford to leave behind the romantic mythology that made the gun respectable. A democracy can tolerate dissent. It should never be expected to tolerate the glorification of those who seek its violent destruction.

Reel Power, Real Stakes

Vijay’s swansong film has become a proxy war in Tamil Nadu’s fiercely-contested election.

Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu

With barley four months before Tamil Nadu goes to the polls, a film has managed to unsettle both the state’s entrenched rulers and the central government in Delhi. Jana Nayagan (“People’s Hero”), the final outing of the superstar-turned-politician Vijay, was meant to be a curtain call to a 30-year film career. It has instead turned into a full-blown constitutional melodrama, replete with a High Court stay, a censor-board rebellion and an extraordinary political pile-on.


The Madras High Court has blocked the film’s release until at least January 21, citing objections from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) that certain scenes could threaten “national security.” For a production that reportedly cost Rs. 500 crore, with theatres booked and Rs. 50 crore in advance collections, the delay is financially ruinous. But the bigger casualty is political. Vijay, who has launched the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) and declared his intention to become Chief Minister, had planned Jana Nayagan as a cinematic springboard into electoral politics.


In Tamil Nadu, cinema is the most potent political technology ever invented. The Dravidian movement mastered it in the 1950s and 1960s, turning films into ideological pamphlets and movie stars into mass leaders. M.G. Ramachandran and later Jayalalithaa rode celluloid stardom to the chief minister’s chair. Vijay’s gamble is that he can do the same in the age of social media and fragmented loyalties.


Jana Nayagan is explicitly designed for that purpose. The trailer presents Vijay as a crusader for fishermen, women and the poor, railing against corrupt institutions and entrenched elites. One line - “I have no intention of turning back. I am coming” - might as well be a campaign slogan. Songs and dialogues portray him less as a fictional hero than as a leader-in-waiting, a Tamil Nadu version of the anti-corruption crusaders who once electrified north India.


That is precisely why the film has become so sensitive. Its scheduled release clashed with Parasakthi, a film steeped in the iconography of the anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, the emotional bedrock of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). In that ideological turf, the DMK brooks no rivals. Matters were inflamed further by reports that Vijay had bypassed Red Giant Movies, the DMK-linked distribution powerhouse run by the party’s first family, to release Jana Nayagan independently. In Tamil cinema, this is tantamount to a declaration of political war.


After a single judge cleared the film, the CBFC appealed, citing unremoved scenes that allegedly imperil national security. A division bench stayed the release. The optics were combustible. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin accused the BJP-led Union government of turning the censor board into yet another instrument of political intimidation, alongside the CBI and Enforcement Directorate. For once, the DMK found itself defending a rival if only to keep the Centre at bay.


The BJP, for its part, has been scrupulously silent, letting the CBFC do the talking. Congress leaders jumped in to back Vijay, triggering an awkward spat within the INDIA alliance. Some DMK figures accused Delhi of trying to nudge Vijay into the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance. Others saw the Centre using regulatory levers to unsettle regional power bases.


Tamil Nadu is a geopolitical outlier within India. It has resisted Hindi imposition, kept the BJP at bay and cultivated a distinct Dravidian identity. Delhi’s attempts to expand its footprint through culture, cinema or celebrity politicians have largely failed. Vijay’s rise threatens to scramble that equation. Unlike earlier film stars, he is positioning himself not as a DMK offshoot but as an anti-establishment insurgent, attacking both the ruling party in Chennai and the BJP in Delhi.


That makes him uniquely dangerous. For the DMK, he risks peeling away young and first-time voters disillusioned with incumbency. For the BJP, he offers a charismatic alternative to a party that has never cracked Tamil Nadu’s emotional code. For Delhi’s mandarins, a Vijay-led government would be another assertive regional actor complicating Centre–state relations.

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